IS THERE any political promise so often broken as that to light a “bonfire of red tape’”?

For years, the Conservatives have vowed to free entrepreneurs from the tiresome business of filling in pointless forms.

Yet for every regulation that is abolished another two or three seem to take its place. David Cameron’s proposal yesterday to force all companies with more than 250 employees to publish figures on the difference in average pay between male and female employees is typical of the burdens loaded on business.

From now on, companies will have to spend valuable time collecting and analysing data on the pay of every employee.

Public bodies already have to collect this data, it is one of the reasons why the number of bureaucrats in your local council keeps on growing while useful services get cut.

Now, for the first time, the duty will be extended to businesses. According to the Prime Minister it is all in the name of ending the “scandal” by which women in the workplace earn only 80 pence for every £1 earned by men. But if there is a problem it is not one which is going to be solved by this measure.

In some cases it may even make it more difficult for women to get a job. The implication of David Cameron’s words is that businesses are deliberately discriminating against female employees by paying them less than their male colleagues. True, there was a time – before the Sex Discrimination Act 40 years ago – when companies did just this.

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No-one wants to go back to those days when, say, a male factory worker would be sitting alongside a female worker, doing exactly the same work and the latter would be paid less than the former.

But there is no evidence of widespread discrimination in the workplace now. You can only reach the conclusion that there is a “gender pay gap” of 20 per cent – as the Prime Minister asserts – by disregarding any differences in the work men and women are doing and the number of hours they are working. When you compare the median hourly earnings of fulltime workers the gender pay gap shrinks to 9.4 per cent – according to the government’s own annual survey of hours and earnings.

When you compare the median hourly earnings of part-time workers the gender pay gap goes into reverse, with women earning 5.5 per cent more than men.

It is not hard to work out why the figures should be skewed in this way: a lot of women in good jobs and with young children are choosing to work part-time.

We have had plenty of women running FTSE 250 companies but only one female Prime Minister

Mothers on lower incomes, on the other hand, do not have this choice: they must return to work full-time. The net effect is to boost the average hourly earnings of part-time female staff and to suppress the corresponding figure for full-time female workers.

But of course, the feminist lobby tends to quote only the figures which support its case and invites us to think that the country is full of chauvinist bosses intent on suppressing women. The raw averages of male and female earnings – which David Cameron wants companies to be forced to publish – are meaningless statistics.

Their publication will make some types of business look very bad.

The average female salary of private health companies, for example, would be dragged down by the large number of care workers they employ, a female-dominated profession. Businesses which employ large numbers of unskilled male staff – like waste companies – would come out looking like models of feminist enlightenment.

Worse, the new rules will create a disincentive for companies in male-dominated sectors to recruit more women.

If you run an engineering company, for example, your workforce is almost certainly highly male dominated.

You might want to employ more women but it will be difficult to find many who are suitably qualified to go straight in at board level, because the number of women who trained as engineers was very low until a few years ago. Take on a few female recruits, however, and the average earnings for women in your company will fall.

Why can’t employers be left to recruit whom they want, without the government breathing down their necks? If you are running a business your very livelihood depends on the quality of your staff.

UlRICH BAUMGARTEN

There are still far fewer female politicians and CEOs

You would have to be a dinosaur to turn down a bright, well-qualified female applicant in favour of a duffer who happens to be male.

Yet ministers seem to think employers can’t be trusted to choose their staff. It is easy to appreciate why David Cameron should feel the need to try to ingratiate himself with the feminist lobby following accusations of sexism after he called Labour shadow minister Angela Eagle to “calm down, dear”.

However well intended though, forcing companies to publish details of staff pay will help to chip away at our free labour market.

The irony is that while politicians love to lecture businesses on employing more women they have a far worse record themselves.

We have had plenty of women running FTSE 250 companies but only one female Prime Minister – and she was hated with a vengeance by feminists.

Labour MPs seem increasingly inclined to vote for a bearded Trotskyite than either of the female candidates for the leadership. If there is a problem with opportunities for women, politicians should put their own house in order before lecturing business.